Posts Tagged ‘gsm fax gateway’

Whilst the GSM Gateway has generally seen a decline in sales over the past few months due to recent price drops in the cost of calling a mobile phone from a landline, there is one product that has shown a dramatic increase and that is the GSM Fax Terminal.

A GSM Fax Terminal is a version of a GSM Gateway / Premicell / FCT / Fixed Cellular Terminal that supports fax transmission.  This means that the user can connect a standard analogue fax machine and send and receive faxes just like normal, but using the mobile phone network.

A great example of this type of Fax GSM Gateway is the Telecom FM Cellfax Plus.  With this product you insert your SIM Card (compatible with O2, T-Mobile, Orange and Vodafone SIM Cards), connect to the mains power and you now have the equivalent to a normal PSTN Analogue Telephone Line.  Plug in your fax machine and use as normal.

Cellfax Plus GSM Fax Terminal

Sending faxes is usually done without issue becuase the Cellfax Plus GSM Fax Terminal send a code to the mobile phone network to advise that a fax is being sent and the mobile phone network can then route the outbound call over a modem that supports fax transmission when the call leaves their network.

However, when receiving faxes, the mobile phone network will not know that the inbound call to your normal mobile phone telephone number is a fax so the call will not be delivered onto the mobile phone network using the correct type of modem that supports fax.  The mobile phone networks deal with this problem in different ways.  O2 and Vodafone will generally provide you with a seperate fax number that you will need to use when receiving faxes.  This way the networks know that calls to that number are faxes and they will recieve them onto their network with the correct modem type.  Orange and T-Mobile (Everything Everywhere) deal with this slightly differently and when you advise them that you need to use the SIM card for faxing they will not issue a seperate number but will set within their system a policy that all inbound calls, whether voice or fax, will be received onto their network with a fax enabled modem so you just get a single number.  However, we have had customers with orange and T-Mobile SIM cards that have been issued seperate fax numbers so there may be some inconsistencies with their provisioning methodology.